THANK DONALD HE SURVIVED THE NO-GO ZONES!:

 A false claim bubbled up from the internet last month that Sen. Kamala Harris, the recently announced presidential candidate, wasn't eligible for election because she had immigrant parents and spent part of her childhood in Canada. The claim, an echo of the "birther" conspiracy that trailed President Barack Obama, was widely debunked but still addressed seriously by mainstream news pundits, including CNN's Chris Cuomo.

Even better for Jacob Wohl, the 21-year-old Californian who ignited the Harris birther claim with a tweet, some people actually seemed to accept it as fact. [...]

He flew to Minnesota last week to "investigate" the rumor that Somali-American Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother, a mission for which he tried to fund-raise $25,000 from his online followers. Wohl's trip to the heartland devolved into bizarre tweets in which he suggested that Minneapolis was so overrun by Somali jihadists that he had to wear a bulletproof vest and travel with a team of "security professionals."

Wohl's most prominent gambit was also his most disastrous: an apparent sloppy attempt to accuse Trump's nemesis special counsel Robert Mueller of sexual misconduct days before the midterm elections in November. His actions were referred to the FBI for potential criminal investigation. The woman he named as a credible accuser of the special prosecutor, Carolyne Cass, recently told USA TODAY that Wohl "made it up," deceived her with a false identity and tried to coerce her to appear at a news conference against her will.

Wohl initially maintained that Cass's allegations were credible. When told that Cass said they were inaccurate, Wohl then claimed that he couldn't speak about the situation because of a legal non-disclosure agreement with Cass, who denied that such an agreement exists. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on whether the agency was investigating the episode. 

Deciphering the Mueller saga is characteristic of how difficult it is to grasp at the truth with Wohl, who represents a political moment in which even the most basic facts are in dispute.  

In some ways, Wohl is simply carrying on the dubious American tradition of deceit in politics, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President." Jamieson described 19th-century political operatives who would secretly buy newspapers to dictate coverage, and the dissemination of false accounts about President Andrew Johnson being a murderer.

The difference now, she said, is that the internet has democratized that deceit. It's more difficult online to determine the source of a claim, a major factor in deciding whether to believe it. Being repeatedly bombarded with a claim - social media's specialty -increases its perceived accuracy, even if it's false and has been publicly debunked. People are more likely to believe a false claim that fits their ideology, and the internet naturally facilitates people like Wohl finding and communicating with like-minded groups.

"It takes a real talent to figure out what kind of deceptions will gain traction," Jamieson said, and to have both the knowledge of their demographic and technical ability to "figure out what will resonate as opposed to what will be laughed at."

Wohl disclosed a raft of schemes he says are in the works that he hopes will resonate in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.  

He says he plans to create "enormous left-wing online properties" - such as deceptive Facebook and Twitter accounts - "and use those to steer the left-wing votes in the primaries to what we feel are weaker candidates compared with Trump." It's a plot similar to what Mueller has charged in indictments that the Russians crafted in an effort to boost the 2016 campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein and hobble Hillary Clinton.  

Another stated scheme: seeking to collect damaging information on left-leaning non-profits including Media Matters for America, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Right Wing Watch by offering their insiders "moral reconciliation," and if that doesn't work, "things of worth" - such as money.

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